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TMIQ Today: Measles & Misinformation · The Most Important Question

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Welcome back to The Most Important Question today, where in just a couple minutes or less, we apply the Actually Pro-Life Principles to a news headline and then help you answer the most important question: What can I do?
• 0:18
  [on-hold music] There are a lot of numbers attached to your kid's school. One is the share of kids in the building who've had their vaccinations, their measles shots.
• 0:34
  But you've probably never seen that number. Thirty-four states and DC do collect and have it, but whether yours will show it to you without a public records request is a different question. Let's look at Pennsylvania.
• 0:46
  Statewide, ninety-three percent of kindergartners have had both measles shots, which sounds fine.
• 0:51
  But again, what I want to know as a parent is what percentage of the kids my kid is actually exposed to every day in their school or in their classroom have had their measles shots.
• 1:01
  You should know the vaccination rates for your kid's school. Friend of the pod, Susan Liautaud, said in her book, The Power of Ethics, "Transparency is sharing accurate information.
• 1:10
  It should include the information that a reasonable person would need in order to make a good choice given their set of circumstances." So here's where a broad statewide number is misleading at best.
• 1:22
  As of Friday, Pennsylvania, where again, ninety-three percent of kindergartners have had both measles shots, also had four hundred and sixty confirmed measles cases, and eighty-three people have been hospitalized.
• 1:34
  Two people in Lancaster County are in the news because they are dead. The state says measles was involved. The county coroner says one of them died of something else. This week, the CDC took both off its national count.
• 1:46
  It's all terrible. But why aren't we talking about the four hundred and sixty people who do actually have measles?
• 1:53
  Because of certain people in power, because of mass dangerous, willful disinformation, measles vaccine rates, among others, are trending down.
• 2:02
  Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health added, "Because measles was largely eliminated in the Commonwealth for more than three decades, people are not familiar with this disease and don't fully understand the potential severity of the illness."
• 2:15
  And that's true.
• 2:16
  It is hard to remember something you didn't experience, but you didn't have to experience it because our parents and some of our grandparents got to make a decision to keep us safe from a variety of infectious diseases that tormented the world for basically ever.
• 2:31
  Now today, very real bad guys like the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who do not care about your kids, are taking advantage of that inexperience. Nobody in Pennsylvania got lucky for thirty-five years.
• 2:44
  Millions of people decided over and over to get their kids and themselves measles shots and polio shots and lots of other very safe shots, and it worked. We all came together to protect all of our children.
• 2:57
  As James Baldwin said in 1980, "The children are always ours. Every single one of them all over the globe. I'm beginning to suspect that whoever's incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality."
• 3:10
  Yeah, they're making an informed choice to make your kids and my kids less safe.
• 3:15
  I don't know what the numbers are for my kids' schools, much less their classrooms, but I'm gonna try to find out, and I'm gonna do everything I can to vote out people who endanger kids anywhere in the world.
• 3:25
  [on-hold music] Thanks for listening. Subscribe for more of these and for my longer conversations with incredible humans who've already asked and answered the most important question for themselves.
• 3:41
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